FOS (Thomas Poulsen) (b. 1971)

Thomas Poulsen, better known as FOS, is a Danish artist and designer. A distinctly private character who avoids the internet and social media, his works have a humanist emphasis on usability and function, whether he is creating engaging architectural environments for French fashion house Céline or designing low-income housing. He posits that ‘if a material is part of a social surface it can interact with a social reality – but that reality needs to be inclusive, it needs to be aware of its physical surroundings. Sometimes you go into an office and you are wondering how the office can work in such a dreadful aesthetic condition, where the sociality has no consciousness of its physical surroundings. I think it’s about awareness and that awareness can happen through aesthetics, so I also think about where the artist’s role lies in an aestheticised real world’ (FOS, quoted in M. Sladen, ‘Interview: FOS,’ Art Review May 2013, p. 72). By fashioning a bunch of keys in the precious medium of silver, he elevates the mundane and everyday to a thing of beauty: heightening consciousness of the keys’ material qualities and the elegance of their practical value, part of FOS’s ‘aestheticised real world’ is brought into exquisite being.